About Special & Digital Collections

Introduction

Special Collections houses library materials deemed too valuable, rare or fragile to be made available through general circulation. Materials include books, manuscripts, sound recordings, musical scores, photographs and artifacts. All materials are open and available for scholarly research but may only be used in the Christopher/Mann Reading Room under the supervision of Special Collections staff. Copying of materials is strictly controlled by our Materials Use Policy. There is generally no fee for non-distributed scholarly or educational use.

In addition to our responsibilities for protecting and preserving rare, valuable and fragile materials generally, our collection development policy focuses on acquiring materials specifically relating to Utah history, southern Utah, the life and works of William Shakespeare and the Native Americans of southern Utah, in particular the Paiute Indian Tribe.

Since 1998, the Sherratt Library has created computer searchable finding aids using the EAD standard to provide Internet access to its collections of historical material and photographs housed in Special Collections and Archives. The Photos/Manuscripts link leads to our SUUper site and permits a search across the collections that have a searchable finding aid. There is also an alphabetized list of these collections and the option to search them individually. Since we are constantly creating EAD finding aids for manuscript collections, coverage of them through the SUUper Search database is always expanding. Four unique photo collections were digitized with access through this site.

In 2002, a second digitization technology was added. It uses high resolution scanning and CONTENTdm software to build a large collection of digitized images for Web distribution. The Photos link leads to these image collections. Each photo collection represents a unique part of Southern Utah history. Other media may be added as the project grows. The Sherratt Library is a partner in the Mountain West Digital Collection.

"Voices of the Colorado Plateau" is an online multimedia museum exhibit featuring oral history recordings and historic photographys that document life on the Colorado Plateau. The Sherratt Library is the lead partner in the "Voices" project that includes three university libraries, the Utah State Historical Society, and four museums.